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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 February 2018
This article will attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of Robert Jenson's account of the Son's existence before his earthly lifetime by arguing that the retroactive presence of the risen Jesus is what Jenson means, and by reflecting on the relationship between the way that grace and power of Christ reaches to the people of Israel and the concept of retrocausality in physics. This article restricts its discussion to the presence of the risen Jesus in the economy, leaving aside the question of the eternity–time relation, on the grounds that one may constructively engage with Jenson's account, regardless of his or her view of eternity.
1 Crisp, Oliver, ‘Incarnation’, in Webster, John, Tanner, Kathryn and Torrance, Iain R. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 168.Google Scholar
2 Crisp, Oliver, God Incarnate: Explorations in Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 69–71, 75.Google Scholar
3 Hunsinger, George, ‘Robert Jenson's Systematic Theology: A Review Essay’, Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002), p. 172.Google Scholar
4 For Jenson, the pre-existence of the Son means his presence in the Old Testament period, or, more precisely put, his presence before his earthly life. It does not denote his pretemporal existence, for Jenson has jettisoned this concept along with that of atemporal eternity.
5 Hunsinger, ‘Review Essay’, p. 178; Molnar, Paul D., Faith, Freedom, and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2015), p. 225.Google Scholar
6 Jenson, Robert, The Triune God, vol. 1 of Systematic Theology [hereafter ST 1] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 197 Google Scholar; emphasis added.
7 Luke 24:51; ST 1:197.
8 ST 1:197.
9 Ibid.
10 Jenson, Robert, God After God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 158.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., p. 159.
12 ST 1:141.
13 Ibid. Jenson himself indeed says, ‘Jesus Christ, the God-man “pre”-exists himself . . . to the pre-existence of Jesus Christ there belongs among other factors his pre-existence in and as the nation of Israel. For Israel also is the human Son.’ Jenson, Robert W., ‘Christ as Culture 1: Christ as Polity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 5 (2003), p. 326 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many readers and critics believe at this point that Jenson has diffused the presence of the eternally begotten and pre-existent Son and replaced it with the people of Israel. See e.g. Gathercole, Simon, ‘Pre-existence and the Freedom of the Son in Creation and Redemption: An Exposition in Dialogue with Robert Jenson’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), pp. 44–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crisp, God Incarnate, p. 72; Nicol, Andrew, Exodus and Resurrection: The God of Israel in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2016), p. 100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 ST 1:76; emphasis added.
15 Jenson, Robert, ‘The Bible and the Trinity’, Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002), p. 331.Google Scholar
16 ST 1:76.
17 Gen 15:1–6; cf. ST 1:79.
18 Jenson, ‘The Bible and the Trinity, p. 332; emphasis added.
19 ST 1:139.
20 Jenson, Robert, ‘Toward a Doctrine of Israel’, CTI Reflection 3 (2000), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar
21 Jenson, Robert, ‘The Trinity in Ezekiel’, Lutheran Forum 44 (2010), p. 9.Google Scholar
22 Jenson, ‘Toward a Doctrine of Israel’, p. 6; emphasis added.
23 Jenson, Robert, Canon and Creed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), p. 85.Google Scholar
24 Jenson, ‘The Trinity in Ezekiel’, p. 9.
25 Jenson, Robert, ‘Scripture's Authority in the Church’, in Davis, Ellen F. and Hays, Richard B. (eds), The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 35.Google Scholar
26 Jenson, ‘Scripture's Authority in the Church’, p. 35; emphasis added.
27 Jenson, ‘The Trinity in Ezekiel’, p. 9; emphasis added.
28 Jenson, ‘Scripture's Authority in the Church’, p. 35.
29 Farrow, Douglas, Ascension Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 83, n. 50.Google Scholar
30 Ibid.
31 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics [hereafter CD]. 13 vols., ed. and trans. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–74), IV/1, p. 322 Google Scholar. For Barth, the resurrection is ‘the initiation of His lordship as the Lord of all time’ (Barth, CD IV/1, p. 316). Here our consideration of the transcendent presence of Jesus, centring upon the significance of the resurrection, should be counterbalanced with the other major motif in Barth's dialectic thought, that is, Jesus’ pre-temporal election. See Hunsinger, George, Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), pp. 279–80.Google Scholar
32 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 322; cf. CD IV/4, p. 25.
33 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 316.
34 Dale Dawson, R., The Resurrection in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 67.Google Scholar
35 Barth, CD III/2, p. 440.
36 Hunsinger, Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed, p. 186.
37 Barth, CD IV/3.2, p. 482.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Barth himself briefly says, ‘[God's] declaration [of reconciliation] has a retroactive force’ which took place in the resurrection. Barth, CD IV/3.1, p. 298.
41 Ibid., p. 300.
42 Torrance, T. F., Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), p. 34 Google Scholar; emphasis added.
43 Ibid., p. 37.
44 Jenson states, ‘Thus Brenz replies to the obvious objection to his claim that Christ's body is ubiquitous: “We do not attribute to his body extension or diffusion in space, but elevate it beyond . . . all location”’ (ST 1:204).
45 Cf. Farrow, Ascension Theology, p. 292.
46 Russell, Robert, Time in Eternity: Pannenberg, Physics, and Eschatology in Creative Mutual Interaction (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), p. 341.Google Scholar
47 Ibid., p. 342. The four equations are: (1) ∇ · E = 4πρ (2) ∇ × E + (1/c)δB/δt = 0 (3) ∇ · B = 0 (4) ∇ × B − (1/c)δE/δt = (4π/c)J
48 Ibid., p. 343.
49 Ibid., p. 342.
50 Ibid., p. 343.
51 Ibid., p. 342.
52 Ibid., p. 343.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Wheeler, J. A. and Feynman, R. P., ‘Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation’, Review of Modern Physics 17 (1945), p. 156 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wheeler, J. A. and Feynman, R. P., ‘Classical Electrodynamics in Terms of Direct Interparticle Action’, Review of Modern Physics 21 (1949), p. 424 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cited in Robert Russell, Time in Eternity: Pannenberg, Physics, and Eschatology in Creative Mutual Interaction, p. 343, n. 68.
56 Russell, Time in Eternity, p. 344.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., p. 347.
59 Price, Huw, ‘Einstein and the Quantum Spooks’, in Stewart, C. and Hewitt, R. (eds), Waves of the Future (Sydney: Science Foundation for Physics, 2005), p. 229.Google Scholar
60 Zeilinger, Anton, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), p. 11.Google Scholar
61 Price, ‘Einstein and the Quantum Spooks’, p. 232. ‘Time symmetry’ is the concept Russell and Feynman also used.
62 Ibid., p. 233.
63 It does not lose Einstein's other assumptions either: the locality and realism. Ibid., pp. 225–6.
64 For his proposal, Price draws upon a Parisian physicist, O. Costa de Beauregard, who proposed ‘Alice's choice could affect Bob's particle indirectly . . . if the effect followed zigzag path, via the past. Alice's choice could affect her particle “retrocausally”, so to speak, right back the common source, in turn correlation Bob's particle with Alice's choice (and vice versa)’. (Huw Price and Ken Wharton, ‘Disentangling the Quantum World’, Entropy, 17 (2015), p. 7754). He could not publish his paper until his thesis supervisor allowed, because he thought his student's idea ‘strange’. Later, the supervisor relented ‘only when Feynmann published a famous paper describing positrons as electrons zigzagging backwards in time’ (Price and Wharton, ‘Disentangling the Quantum World’, p. 7754).
65 Robert Russell said this in an email to me. I must thank him for his kind reply and this insight.
66 Edwards, Jonathan, Miscellanies, 926 quoted in Robert Jenson, America's Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 182.Google Scholar
67 The B-theory of time holds that such temporal indexicals like ‘now’ and ‘today’, as well as the passage of time, are not grounded in reality but merely a subjective illusion.
68 The ‘block universe’ is often described as B-theorists’ vision of the reality, in which ‘the dimensions of space and the dimension of time combine to form an unchanging four-dimensional whole’: Poidevin, Robin Le, ‘Time and Freedom’, in Dyke, Heather and Bardon, Adrian (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 539 Google Scholar. In that theory, the whole history of the universe is determined and complete.
69 In the A-theory of time, the passage of time is not merely a subjective perception but an objective reality.
70 Jenson, ST 2:33, n. 17.
71 Miller, Kristie, ‘Presentism, Eternalism, and the Growing Block’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, p. 347 Google Scholar. The moving spotlight is formulated in Skow, Bradford, ‘Relativity and the Moving Spotlight’, Journal of Philosophy, 106 (2009), pp. 666–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
72 Broad, Charlie, Scientific Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923), p. 59.Google Scholar
73 For Jenson, the Spirit as the freedom of God ‘liberates each successive specious present from mere predictability, from being only the result of what has gone before’ (ST 1:66).
74 Proponents of this theory include Broad, C. D., Scientific Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923)Google Scholar; Tooley, Michael, Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Forrest, Peter, ‘General Facts, Physical Necessity, and the Metaphysics of Time’, in Zimmerman, D. (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 137–54Google Scholar.
75 For Russell's argument for ‘a relational and inhomogeneous temporal ontology’, see Robert Russell, Time in Eternity, pp. 123-93. This amounts to a new flowing time interpretation of special relativity. Importantly, it is not necessary to postulate that the forefront temporal slice is straight. It could be wiggly.
76 Jenson, God After God, p. 165: ‘A true future is thus no mere possible rectification of one or another shortcoming of the present.’